Update: If I'd realised so many people would visit from Annie Rhiannon, I'd have put up a more cheery post... I'm not always this grumpy! Do stop by again!
Today we had our fortnightly progress meeting, at which I always end up ranting like a nutter and regretting it. Made a resolution to bite my lip, but despite the calming happy pills I didn't manage it. AND ANOTHER THING that makes me furious is that fact that I come across as a ranting nutter - not only do they want you to just shut up and get on with it, we're not even allowed to talk about it any more. Dissent is frowned upon, as new iniatives from the borough ( ie the government) are now treated like they've been served up piping hot from God Almighty. The teachers are expected to be passive and unquestioning, and so are the poor kids. Poor little buggers. We're giving them an utterly miserable childhood and training them up for a lifetime of wage slavery.
Anyhoo - the final straw was when our admin-crazy mgmt delivered some spreadsheets recording Incidents of Behaviour. One of the little boys in my group (one of my favourites, not that I have favourites oh no) I saw had offended. For, I quote, "throwing snow". There it was, logged on the spreadsheet, a 7 year old's record of shame. HOW DARE 7 YEAR OLD BOY THROW SNOW! No doubt this record will be compiled and end up somewhere in the LEA's statistics.
Must. Get. Out.
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4 days ago
12 comments:
Oh no. Is it a Catholic school?
There is one happy side-effect for me in regard to your miseries with the system: I signed up a couple of months ago for an agency recruiting teachers for schools in Kent and Essex. Since then they've been doing the kind of hard-sell that would be a crack-dealer's wet dream. It's onviously becoming extremely difficult to recruit teachers there if they'll crawl all over Irish people without really having a clue about their qualifications or personality. I was invited to attend informal interviews (in Dublin) today. But I've seen enough content on your blog to convince me that I would be miserable and frustrated working within the English educational system. So I didn't go.
Mind you, it's only slightly better here, and gradually heading the same way as England.
Can you hold a tune? Does Annie R fancy a double-act?
No, Misiula, just a regular state school. In a funny way, I think faith schools here even have a bit more freedom, though they have to follow the same national curriculum.
Andrew, DON'T DO IT DON'T DO IT! One of my friends works in a secondary school in Kent and it's very, very tough.
I hear that Wales is a bit more enlightened about education, especially in primary schools... I'm sad that Irish schools are going the same way, I met lots of Irish girls on my teacher training course and it sounded much better in Ireland.
Arabella, good thinking! Or at least I could play the tambourine and pass around the hat afterwards...
Bugger me. Poor kid. Throwing snow is what snow is FOR!
And you can't spreadsheet children. Fact. Excel and young people are fundamentally incompatible. Unless I've missed a patch from Microsoft.
I'm on the fence about this. It all sounds very innocent, but I don't want to jump to conclusions and be all "Government, booooo". I mean, for all I know he's a terrorist kid, throwing terrorist snow. What with the surfeit of nuclear material in today's black market, and what with my awful newspaper-reading habits, the threat of dirty snowballs is absolutely something that keeps me up at night.
Junior Stasi anyone?
Throwing snow is an offence? We were encouraged to get out there, run around and have snowball fights when I was a schoolkid in the wilds of Essex.
I dunno. A friend of mine was a teacher and one snowy day all the kids threw snowballs at her. Except they'd stuffed big rocks inside the snowballs and she ended up with head injuries and PTSD and was off work for months.
Children are evil.
Boz - well exactly. EXACTLY!
Emordino - terrorist snow! Tee hee! You can't be too careful.
Llewtrah, well, clearly! This was a small but significant indicator of how totally mad the world of education has become over the years.
GSE, those kids who hurt your friend sound like they were total psychopaths, but that's like saying all adults are paedophiles... Our kids are lovely, and we're talking about a 7 year old boy, who's good as gold, seeing snow for the first time in his young life, having a totally natural desire and reaction - like Boz said, snowballs are what snow is for when you're a child. It was just a very scary, troubling insight into the insane, bureaucratic nature of school - I realised that they've lost the ability or don't actually see them as children at all anymore. They see them as stats, as little salespeople who need to reach certain 'targets'.
Em - absolutely. Which reminds me, did you ever see The Lives of Others? I still haven't seen it.
Annie, do rent The Lives of Others. The main actor - sadly no longer with us - has the best face evah. And you can have Berlin nostalgia.
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